Oct

12

In Social Marketing Leverage, I stated that the Internet gives us the ability to transfer information with relative ease and enables a great variety of online tools to provide us with a virtual type of leverage.

In this article, I discuss another physical phenomenon, that of momentum, as it applies to the non-physical social marketing process.

Momentum is the impetus of an object or a process, its tendency to remain in motion. If you’ve ever skated or cross-country skied, you’ve enjoyed momentum or gliding.

When riding in a car or bus that stopped short, you were thwarted by momentum as the vehicle stopped, but you kept going.

Most of the time, we don’t want to lose momentum. We’ve worked up some speed, or we’re highly productive — and we want it to continue.

Losing Physical Momentum

In the physical world, these factors can cause us to lose our momentum:

Collision - Its outcome is generally hard to predict and is often catastrophic.

Friction - Air, water and even our own brakes slow us down or stop us completely.

Turning - To avoid collision, negotiate speed bumps or alter our final destination, we must brake partially or completely to change our direction.

Losing Social Media Momentum

In our non-physical social marketing work, the same factors contribute to our loss of momentum and productivity:

Collision - Hitting the proverbial brick wall. A major plan is flawed, we accidentally delete all of our Twitter followers, or our Facebook account is phished. My advice in Social Marketing Leverage to “develop good contingency plans for when Murphy’s Law does strike” applies here and to all aspects of our lives.

Friction - Indecision, multitasking, working at home while the kids are seeking attention, working at the office while a co-worker in the next cubicle is blabbing, slow social networking sites, associates who don’t keep their word, etc. These all tend to slow us down.

Turning - This is huge. Abandoning a blog, changing our branding strategy midstream and other false starts lead to directional changes that slow us down and cost both time and money.

Sep

28

According to Wikipedia, the 80/20 Rule or Pareto principle “states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”.

The 80 and the 20 are not exact. The 80/20 Rule is what’s commonly known as a rule of thumb.

The 80 20 Rule is an abstract concept, but it’s important to understand it, so let me provide you with some concrete examples that I believe will help.

The 80/20 Rule and You

Approximately 80% of all income is paid to 20% of all people.

The highest paid people earn substantially more than the lowest paid ones. This is a phenomenon of which nearly all of us are acutely aware, and it often seems unfair.

However, 80% of all productivity comes from the efforts of 20% of all people. These 20% of people are the ones who:

have a good measure of internal motivation

have a high level of personal productivity

consistently invest in personal development

commit to their goals and focus their efforts

leverage their money and their time

Needless to say 80% of all people follow the 20% of all people who lead them.

While 80% of people spend their disposable income on what Robert Kiyosaki points to as worthless items which they think are assets, the 20% live frugally and spend as much as possible on income producing investments that pay them over and over again.

While 80% of people trade their time for money, the 20% use their time to develop businesses that leverage the time of the 80% – employees — and also outsource and sub-contract to other businesses in order to gain even more leverage.

The 80% of people tend to take it easy or look for get rich schemes and shortcuts to success. They follow the path of least resistance, and they settle for much less than they really want.

Are you in the 80% or the 20%?

If you’re in the 80%, ask yourself what shift in thinking could transform you into one of the 20%.

The 80/20 Rule and Other People

If you’re in the 20%, then you need to apply the 80-20 Rule to the people around you:

80% of your work is done by 20% or your workers. Spend 80% of your time developing your most productive workers.

So too in a direct or networking sales business: 80% of your results will come from 20% of your team. Spend 80% of your time developing your most productive team members.

80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients or customers. Your time should be spent conducting business with your best clients. There are some business experts who would go as far as firing the 80% of unprofitable clients. That may not always be feasible. In many industries such as health care or telecom firing costly customers could result in a public relations nightmare.

The 80/20 Rule and Social Marketing

Here are some Internet and social media applications of the 80-20 principle:

You can add to the list when you comment on this post — assuming of course that you’re one of the 20% of all readers.

You Can’t Know Everything

Expertise is a valuable asset when it comes to personal branding. As an expert you can teach and mentor others and differentiate yourself from your competition.

To become a top expert in any field requires years of dedication. You still won’t know everything there is to know.

You can generally acquire more knowledge than 80% of all people with 20% of the effort it takes to become a top expert. This feat often takes much less than a year. To overtake and pass the remaining 20% of all people might take many years or even a lifetime.

I like to call this particular aspect of the Pareto principle The Law of Diminishing Returns. Beyond a certain point each successive increment of result will require more effort than the previous increment. It becomes harder and harder to justify additional time investments.

In this era of specialization you can read a few books on a subject and know more about a subject than nearly everybody else. That’s the kind of expertise I’m recommending — coupled of course with some practical hands-on experience.

Invest your time to acquire knowledge that your prospective clients or customers will appreciate.

When I was a teen I worked and struggled obsessively to become a top chess player, and I succeeded.

Nowadays I prefer to grasp multiple subjects and to seek synergies among them: many types of data analysis, search engine optimization, marketing, social networking, blogging, etc.

You Can’t Do Everything

Like it or not we can’t follow up on every idea or opportunity that presents itself. The Law of Diminishing Returns guarantees that. Therefore we must make value judgments and set priorities every day.

Fortunately the 80/20 Rule is on our side.

80% of all benefit accrues to us by accomplishing 20% of everything on our plate. Each day we ought to focus on a half dozen high priority agenda items that will move our businesses and our lives forward.

If only we did that consistently each and every day our lives would be filled with accomplishments and satisfaction.

Nobody however is perfect. We all have bad days. Yet, the 20% group prioritizes and moves forward with much greater focus and consistency than the 80% group.

Please don’t underestimate the power of the 80/20 Rule and the enormous potential of a modest 20 percent.

Jun

22

This post is somewhat longer than usual. Sorry for that, but I put a lot of work into it. I hope you like it.

Last Wednesday during my regular bi-weekly business mentoring tele-conference I revealed several powerful business success secrets.

While I was specifically addressing entrepreneurs, small business owners and sales professionals, these principles apply to all people and to all areas of our lives, not only business success.

Have you noticed? The year 2008 is half over.

Near the end of 2007 I posted Personal Development: 10 Simple Success Strategies to “help turbo charge your personal development in the New Year”. This may be worth re-reading if some of your goals and objectives have lost much of their earlier inertia.

Commitment

“In order to accomplish something, you must know what you want and be willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish it.”

It sounds too simple, doesn’t it? However, it is your intention and commitment that set The Law of Attraction into motion on your behalf.

Want proof?

Reflect back on your most important accomplishments, such as raising a child, getting a college degree, running a marathon, starting a business, or developing an Internet presence, and you’ll agree that your commitment to your success was absolute.

It wasn’t that you felt obligated. Rather you felt that the goal was extremely important to you, and that you would deal with any obstacle that might arise — without knowing in advance exactly what would be demanded of you on your way to success.

Without total commitment TheLaw of Attraction would have probably delivered an obstacle that you would not have been willing to handle, and you would have failed.

Acquiring New Skills

I am commited to ongoing personal development and acquisition of new knowledge and skills. I read mind expanding books, blogs and e-books.

Your objective may require the mastery of new skills – or it may not. Your willingness to do what it takes is what really matters. If new skills are required, then you must be ready and willing to learn them.

Working Hard

You may be required to apply a great amount of effort. When I wanted to run the New York Marathon in 1984, strenuous preparation was absolutely necessary. In 1985 that was still true but to a lesser extent, since I had maintained a high level of fitness in the interim.

Tenacity and Persistence

Let’s bring this home.

You want to develop a presence at one of your favorite social networking sites – or you want to write a blog – or you want to build an Internet presence. These objectives usually require a high degree of tenacity.

So often people abandon online social networking, blogging or social media optimization without realizing their objectives. They weren’t willing to persist. Perhaps their belief system was weak.

Treat Your Business Like a Business

Production

Success in business and life depends on producing value either directly or indirectly through people you influence.

If you have a job and don’t produce, you won’t get very far, and sooner or later you won’t have a job.

If you have a business and don’t produce, you won’t have money in the bank.

If you don’t come through for people, you won’t have their friendship.

You must make a positive contribution in order to be successful.

One way to ensure that you’re productive is to set daily or weekly goals or benchmarks.

For example, let’s suppose you’re in sales. You need to make six product sales per month to meet your business objectives. In order to make six sales, you need to make 15 presentations. To get 15 appointments, you’ll need to speak to 60 people.

You work about 20 days per month. On average you will have to speak to three people per day in order to speak to 60 per month.

Your benchmark or goal becomes three a day. If you focus on 3+ per day with consistency, you will likely make your six product sales per month.

Diversification

Big corporations employ a wide variety of media and messages to bring their product to market. They advertise on television, radio, in print and through direct mail. They experiment with many versions of their ad copy.

You cannot do everything a giant company can do, but why not learn from their example?

If you use half a dozen methods to reach out to your potential clients, you’ll enjoy these benefits:

You’ll achieve success with some approaches, even if others fail.

You’ll attract a wider variety of clients than using a single method.

You’ll be able to see which methods perform better relative to each other, so that you can refine your marketing plan.

You can’t afford to run your business with your eyes shut or even partially covered.

Cost per Acquisition

One of the most basic marketing measurements is cost per acquisition, the amount that you’re spending on average to complete a sale using each marketing method. Simply put, it’s the total spend divided by the total number of sales.

It is important to consider your staff costs including your own time, not just the out-of-pocket expenditures for design and media.

Cost per acquisition is an excellent way to compare marketing channels, but there is one very important caveat. Customers from one marketing channel may be more valuable than from another. Therefore marketers must take into account customer long term value, the other side of the equation.

Customer Long Term Value

Customer long term value can be difficult to calculate, but it is generally approximated as the income you expect to earn from a customer over a 12 to 24 month period. If your business is on the risky side, lean towards 12 months. If it is very stable, then 24 months may be appropriate.

To be successful, cost per acquisition cannot exceed customer long term value. It ought to be less.

Trend Data

You can also track your performance or the performance of your staff. Trending performance data and marketing data over time will help you see the bigger picture.

Masterminding and Mentoring

As stated in my post Even Mentors Need Mentors, “I learn from reading many books, e-books and blogs, and from speaking frequently with friends and mentors. Having mentors has greatly shortened my learning curve.”

Masterminding with your peers and seeking out mentors will help you as much or more than any other single strategy mentioned in this article.

Please feel free to comment and share those strategies that have made the biggest difference in your business and personal endeavors.

We both know that consistency is important. We’ve heard it over and over since we were kids. But just how important is it?

Obviously if we take no action we go nowhere.

But what if we have a bias for action? How much do we benefit?

We benefit in two ways:

Multiplication of Effort. Can you learn a foreign language or a difficult subject in 30 minutes? You can if it’s 30 minutes per day. That’s 15 hours per month or 180 hours per year. Over the course of the year you gradually master the language or the concepts that you’re studying.

Compounding of Results. If you’re a social networker, here’s where you get a big payoff. Every person you meet knows other people. The bigger your network grows, the more people who you don’t know will reach out to you to connect. You apply the same constant effort, yet your results increase exponentially.

When I first joined the LinkedIn community, I spent time each day seeking out and adding new contacts. Today I have more than 2,000 direct contacts and a LinkedIn network of nearly eight million people. Do you think I still need to look for people to invite?

Perhaps I should, but I get a half a dozen requests per day sitting back and doing nothing. People are easily finding me through my existing contacts, because I took the time to build a large network.

No matter what you’re looking to accomplish, why not break it down into small daily actions as I suggest in Critical Success Factors?

Establish daily benchmarks for yourself. Meet one person per day. Walk a mile or two. Save a few dollars. Give something to charity. You get the idea.

Multiply your daily effort by the number of days in a month or in a year, and you’ll be astonished at your potential for achievement. Add compounding of results or compounding of interest, and your consistent effort will have a profound effect on your life, as well as the lives of the people who matter the most to you.